Every Room Is a Relationship Room

Esther Perel has spent her career observing something most of us know but rarely name: we don’t leave ourselves at the door when we go to work.

The dynamics that play out in our families, who gets heard, who goes quiet, who escalates, who withdraws, show up with remarkable consistency in our professional lives. The colleague who can’t bear to be wrong in a meeting. The manager who shuts down when given feedback. The business partner who slowly stops saying what they really think. These are not personality flaws. They are attachment patterns wearing professional clothing.

Alain de Botton writes about this with characteristic precision: we are all carrying a version of our childhood emotional education into every room we enter. We learned early what it means to be heard or ignored, respected or dismissed, safe or under threat. We bring those strategies to work, to partnerships, to negotiations, and to mediation rooms.

This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for a different kind of conversation when things go wrong.

My work across all four practices, counselling, mediation, relationship therapy, and the Mediation Room, starts from the same place. Whether I am sitting with a couple who have been having the same argument for fifteen years, or two business partners who have stopped trusting each other, or a parent and child who have lost each other in the middle of a separation, the question I am always asking is the same: what is actually happening between these people?

The dispute is usually not the dispute. The argument about the custody schedule is also about grief. The property negotiation is also about feeling abandoned. The workplace complaint is also about years of feeling invisible. None of that has to be fixed for the practical problem to be resolved — but it has to be acknowledged. It has to be in the room.

Wherever you are, there is a room for that.